Toni Morrison Keeps Her Children Close

Author Toni Morrison was living in Syracuse, New York, the single mother of two boys, when she started writing The Bluest Eye. Every day she got up at 4:00 a.m. to write before going to work at publisher Random House, where she was an editor. Morrison is blunt about this chapter in her life: “I don’t think I did any of that very well,” she told The Telegraph. “I did it ad hoc, like any working mother does.” Noting that her kids had simple needs during their youth—expecting her only to be competent, have a sense of humor, and be an adult—Morrison still keeps her children close. The author wears a heart necklace, carved from butterstone, around her neck as a connection to her son Slade, who died at 45 of pancreatic cancer, and she dedicated her novel Home to him. As the character Sethe says in Morrison’s acclaimed novel Beloved, “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing.”